LA 210 

.B75 
1915 






^ & 

w 






"-W 








(V r ° " ° -9 ^5 \V 




S » • A *> \> a * • O 




-o . » • .iv ^o 









<V 



\0 «?\ * W 



* ** 





r oV 






















■*^^ 



,5^ 



,t- 




^ 



bV 












bK 







V" .TV- 




..... .0* \ 




If + 

v^ T '>° \>^v^ V^-'V \: ; ^v' 




N 



A National System of Education 

Presidential Address 

Before the Association of American 

Agricultural Colleges and 

Experiment Stations 
Berkeley, California 
By Enoch A. Bryan 






TWENTY-NINTH SESSION 



Association of American Agricultural Colleges 



OFFICERS OF THE ASSOCIATION 



PRESIDENT 

Enoch A. Bryan, State College of Washington 

VICE-PRESIDENTS 
J. H. Worst, Agricultural College of North Dakota; C. D. Woods, Univer- 
sity of Maine ; J. F. Duggar, Agricultural College of Alabama ; P. H. 
Rolfs, University of Florida; T. F. Hunt, University of California; 
C. A. Lory, Agricultural College of Colorado. 

SECRETARY-TREASURER 
J. L. Hills, University of Vermont 

BIBLIOGRAPHER 
A. C. True, Washington, D. C. 

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 
W. O. Thompson, University of Ohio, Chairman; H. J. Waters, Kansas 
Agricultural College; W. H. Jordan, New York Experiment Station; 
Brown Ayres, University of Tennessee; H. L. Russell, University of 
Wisconsin. 









A NATIONAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION. 



Presidential Address before the Association of American 
Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, at 
Berkeley, California, by Enoch A. Bryan. 

The counterpart of the theory of "local self-government" 
to which we, as a people, were from the beginning devoted, 
has been our scheme of local education. Among our English 
ancestors, the most primitive and imperative obligation rest- 
ing on the free citizen was the trinoda necessitas — the triple 
obligation — the repair of bridges and roads; the repair of de- 
fenses, whether wall, hedge, or ditch; and military service. 
Our colonial forbears added to the primitive and ancestral 
duty of working the roads and military duty, the obligation 
of providing for the modern defenses — the education of our 
Youth. 

The local school and the local church have been, from the 
early settlement, characteristic and universal. The academy 
and the college on private or church foundation, strengthened 
this tendency toward the local and self-sufficing institution. 
For two centuries the school and college remained a non-gov- 
ernmental function. As a state function, the history of edu- 
cation is confined to little more than a century and its prin- 
cipal development belongs to the last half century. 

Foreigners accustomed to recognize in the educational ad- 
ministrative department of Modern European Constitutional 
Governments, one of the most important portfolios of the cen- 
tral government, wonder that, in America, passionately devot- 
ed as it is to the ideal of universal education, there should 
be no cabinet position to represent and promote this most 
essential element of the national life. 

To the American, the explanation is very simple. Under 
our dual system of government, in so far as education has 
been a state function at all, it has been relegated to the local 
community or state government. There was nothing, there- 
fore, for a Secretary of Education to do. 

At the very beginning of the Constitutional Period, the 
United States became possessed of a patrimony of public lands. 
This possession was destined to play a most important part in 
our national development, and in nothing a greater part than 



in our Education. The declaration of the Ordinance of 1787 
that ''schools and the means of Education shall forever be 
encouraged," has had more than the force of law — it has been 
truly constitutional. By universal consent, the Public Land 
was, in some way, to further the nation's greatest aspiration, 
namely, the education of the people. 

At the outset, direct gifts for educational purposes were 
made to local organizations or communities, the government 
merely assuming the role of benefactor and undertaking no 
sort of control or direction of the methods by which the bene- 
ficiary should receive the benefits. This was in full recog- 
nition of the accepted doctrine of the local control of the 
school. 

Next, gifts of land were made direct to townships or states, 
as in the case of the sixteenth section for common schools and 
an entire township to each state for a university. The role of 
benefactor was still maintained and much of the potential force 
of the gift as well as of its money value was thereby lost. It 
led, however, to the activity of stale and local government in 
the management of the patrimony, and to the organization of 
school systems and institutions for the carrying out the pur- 
poses of the gift, and this, in turn, led, in the next half cen- 
tury, to the permanent establishment of the governmental 
function in education and of systems of taxation and manage- 
ment on the part of the state and local units. There was noth- 
ing "national" about our system of education, except what 
was due to the common religious heritage and the common 
aspirations of the people, due in turn to the common racial 
origin of the settlers. 

Our secondary and higher education was from the beginning 
essentially imitative in substance, ideals, methods and instru- 
ments. The American Cambridge was, in miniature, as far as 
conditions would permit, the English Cambridge. The crea- 
tion of a special class — an educated class capable of minister- 
ing to the spiritual and political welfare of the people, was the 
aim. The American college for more than two centuries — yes, 
for two and a half centuries — was essentially monastic. A 
"monastic" was a "solitary," and to produce a "monastic," 
or a "clerk," a "scholar," was the ideal of the American col- 
lege, just as it had been the aim of its predecessor, the Euro- 
pean college, which from the beginning was essentially 
monastic. The call of the college to the chosen youth of the 
land was, "Come ye forth from among them. Purify your gar- 
ments; cleanse and sanctify yourself unto your high and holy 
calling." The scholar shall wear different garments, speak a 
different speech, preserve a different mien, maintain a differ- 
ent countenance from the rest of the community. His hands 



were soft, his body spare and weak, and his eyes hollow. He 
lived in a past world, a dead world. He walked in the higher 
and holier realms of Logic and Rhetoric^ of Philosophy and 
Theology. The Bachelors constituted to all intents and pur- 
poses, an order of which masters and doctors were merely 
higher degrees. Academies were the counterpart of the col- 
leges — the doorway through which the devotees might enter. 
The curriculum came to assume an almost ceremonial and ritu- 
alistic function. When in a later day, the deficiencies of the 
system for ministering to the needs of a real world, a living 
world, a world that must be clothed and fed withal, became ap- 
parent, the doctrine of "disciplinary" values, of "cultural" 
values — casuistry, pure and simple — quieted for a generation 
or two the hungering after real food for the real life which 
our people were to live. "Authority," by which was meant 
the dictum of the fathers, the supremacy of the verbal method 
and monastic ideals of scholarship long ruled and reigned over 
us. It was our inheritance from centuries of the Verbalists 
System. Its devotees formed a caste, honored by all, wor- 
shipped by some. It continued to reign over us without dis- 
pute until the middle of the last century. Even yet, the monu- 
ments of this kingdom are all about us. 

It was inevitable that if such a country as America should 
rise, then such a system as the Verbalistic would fall. (Inder 
the spell of such an imitative system it is no matter of surprise 
that for the first half century of independent national exist- 
ence, our government should be dominated by it, and that the 
land grants for educational purposes which reflected the aspir- 
ation of our people for universal education, should be handed 
over unconditionally by the national government to local insti- 
tutions and governments. Nor is it a matter of surprise that 
local communities, spurred by these gifts to activity, should, 
in the establishment of schools and colleges, have continued the 
old imitative system. Aristotle and formal logic, linguistics 
and forensic disputations were the food upon which the earlier 
state universities fed their disciples, just as they had consti- 
tuted the food of the mediaeval" colleges. "Words, Words, 
Words" was the only answer of the college, whether state, 
church or private, to the cry for intellectual food. "College 
bred" men and the "overcrowded professions" and "culture" 
and "discipline" were 1he response of higher education to the 
cry of a new nation, throbbing with new life, new powers and 
new hopes and the intimations of the New Science and the New 
Industry and the New Democracy. 

The Slavery question postponed the day of a better and truer 
answer. The new thought that an industrial democracy must 
have an education adapted to its real needs almost burst forth 



at the end of the first quarter of the last century, but the slav- 
ery problem on the one hand and the wonderful literary out- 
burst on the other diverted the current into other channels. 

The struggle of the New Democracy was not destined to find 
expression in universal suffrage and representative govern- 
ment alone, nor in equality of all men in the eyes of the law, 
nor in the ejection of human slavery from the body politic, but 
also, more truly still, in a democracy of knowledge, in a de- 
mocracy of efficiency, in an educational democracy in which 
the indivdual should achieve his education by means of the 
very instruments with which he was to do his life work, and 
the education thus established should be genuine education ; 
education by means of Agriculture, not for the sake of the 
agricultural products — by means of the Mechanic Arts, not 
for the products of industry — by means of Commerce, not for 
abundance of goods, but for the sake of Man himself. 

The culmination of the aspiration for a new education adapt- 
ed to the needs of the New Democracy was in the establishment 
of the system of the Land Grant Colleges in the United States. 
No more mistaken or sinful interpretation of the movement 
could have been suggested than that it was the outgrowth of 
a low commercialism. 

The conception was original and it was national, 
in the ideals to be attained, in the instruments to be used, in 
the pedagogical methods to be employed and in the organiza- 
tions to be established. We were not conscious of this fact 
then, we are but dimly conscious of it now, and we have been 
but slowly growing conscious of it during the past half cen- 
tury. None the less, the education with the new instruments, 
by the new methods, to the new ends, truly national in scope, 
is in distinct harmony with the ideals of democracy — essential 
to its existence — and it is truly national. It is not only the 
realization of the "Novum Organum," the new instrument, but, 
also, of the New Purpose, the New End. 

The great revolution lay in the fact that the conscious nation 
through its supreme legislative now determined to effect a Mew 
Purpose — a New End. Hitherto, the educational aims of our 
people, beyond the most elementary steps, were to secure 
through a small, select and isolated class, Hie abstract end of 
training the people in righteousness, creating laws and estab- 
lishing justice. The "learned" class became sponsor through 
their abstractions of theology, law, and learning for the w el- 
fare of their fellows. Their preparation for this function was 
primarily by a literary and verbalistic regime. The supreme 
emphasis upon "Mind" as a distinct entity from the body, and 
its development by food proper to it, un contaminated by any 
materialistic connection, was responsible in part for the rejec- 



tion of Science as an instrument of education and the utter 
avoidance of any utilitarian infection. 

From this epoch forward, however, one, at least, of the pur- 
poses of education should be to minister to our common human 
welfare. Moreover, the end should be the education of the in- 
dustrial classes, in contrast with the exclusive education of the 
professional classes. The "new instrument" and the new 
method by means of the common things of life should train the 
man for the life he should have to live. A proper knowledge 
and use of our material environment and an understanding of 
the relation of these to the ordinary social welfare and to the 
physical and social as well as the intellectual and spiritual well 
being shall be the goal. 

The line between the old and the new is clearly drawn. On 
the one side lies the ' ' learned professions, ' ' constituting a small 
and select class, separating itself in knowledge, interest, occu- 
pations and attainments from the great mass of their country- 
men, living off the stipend cheerfully paid for their support by 
the producing classes. Their education has been verbal, their 
tastes literary, their reasoning speculative, their faces directed 
to the past. 

On the other sides lies the great mass of the community who 
deal with, material things and material concerns primarily — 
the great producing and consuming classes. Of these, there 
are the two grand divisions — those engaged in the great ex- 
tractive industries, Agriculture, Mining, etc., and those belong- 
ing to the great constructive industries, Architecture, Manu- 
facturing and all others who manipulate materials. Much that 
is fundamental, both in the sciences and arts, is common to 
both the extractive and the constructive industries. Between 
them lies the great group devoted to Commerce, Transporta- 
tion and Trade. These, all together, form the Industrial Classes. 
The work and the workers in all these are inextricably inter- 
related. 

Over against these Industrial Classes are the old time Pro- 
fessional Classes. Education was the basis of the honor, the 
prestige, the usefulness of the latter; what could education do 
for the former? 

What stroke of genius, what guidance of Divine Providence, 
may have led, in the initial legislation, to the use of these two 
great comprehensive and generic terms, "Agriculture" and 
"Mechanic Arts," and to the equally happy phrase used to de- 
fine and describe the purposes of the system about to be estab- 
lished — "the Industrial Classes" — I do not know, but no more 
happy or illuminating phrases could have been found. The en- 
tire field of production, the whole realm of human industry is 
involved in the phrases used. 



And the methods and instruments which were to serve the 
new education were in like contrast to the methods and instru- 
ments which had so long served the old. The Authority of the 
Book was to give way to the Authority of Nature ; the literary 
to the scientific method; deductive to inductive philosophy; 
philosophic generalizations to scientific fact; the manna of 
idealism to the BREAD OF LIFE; the learned professions to 
the learned vocations; magna chartas of "liberties," to chart- 
ers of opportunities and abilities, guaranteed by a knowledge 
of Nature and skill in the manipulation of her materials and 
products. The "Industrial Classes," for whom higher educa- 
tion had not been directly intended, were now to become the 
chief object of her solicitude. Not a single industrial class, but 
all the members of all the industrial classes were to be the 
beneficiaries, and that by instrumentalities wholly in contrast 
with those of the old system and adapted alike to the entire 
membership of these classes — to everyone who makes or manip- 
ulates or forwards or otherwise produces material wealth. Let 
us not forget for a moment where the line lies between the old 
system and the New National System born in 1862, between 
education primarily for a small and select literary caste and 
education for the vast producing multitude. It is not between 
one producing class — the farmer — and all the rest, but be- 
tween the producing and the non-producing classes of society. 
Herein, hitherto, has been misconception and blundering, which 
have materially interfered with our progress. 

The methods, curricula and instruments of the new national 
system of education indicate alike its distinction from the old 
and its solidarity within itself. Henceforth, Education was to 
face in a new direction. It was to have a new mission. The 
new thought developed first in higher education. In the end, 
it has permeated secondary and elementary education. It has 
exerted a powerful influence in the modification of the tradi- 
tional literary system, and the traditional institution, in so 
much so, that man}' account themselves apostles of the new sys- 
tem without knowing whence it came or how or why it came 
1o pass. 

To carry out this new national ideal of an education "of the 
people, for the people and by the people" a system of colleges 
and universities was founded with an institution in each state 
and territory, deriving, in part, the means of subsistence from 
national sources and confining its chief purpose to the national 
ideal. 

Here was an Epoch indeed. 

Two things astonish us: First, that this, the greatest piece 
of Educational Legislation of the century, should have been 
enacted amidst the throes of the Civil War. It was in 1862. 



when Bull Run had been fought, when the very existence of 
the nation and the success of the Great Experiment in Democ- 
racy were in doubt, that this great act of Peace legislation, this 
act establishing a new and revolutionary system of national 
education in harmony with the genius of our political institu- 
tions, was passed by the Congress of the United States. 

The other cause of astonishment is that a layman, not an 
"Educator" should have been responsible for this, the most 
astonishing legislative phenomenon — so far as education is con- 
cerned — in our national history. It was not a graduate of on* 
of our great universities but of the University of Hard Knocks 
who became the national benefactor in this most important 
legislation. 

With a wisdom and conservatism worthy of the great states- 
man who conceived the new system, the transition from the old 
to the new and the final coalescence of the best and most per- 
manent elements of both the old and the new, were provided 
for. Existing institutions, representative of the old system 
might, in certain instances and under certain conditions, be- 
come the embodiment of the new idea. With equal care to 
guard against revolutionary destructiveness, the law provided 
against the exclusion of old and tried elements of the tradi- 
tional curriculum. That well known provision against the ex- 
clusion of "classical" studies does not refer to Latin and Greek,, 
but it uses the word "classical" in that broader sense in which 
we use it in describing the best in music, art or literature. 

It was inevitable that the new system should be put into 
operation by men whose education, tastes, philosophy, and 
predilections were with the old system. The sad story of the 
first twenty-five years of effort, disappointment and loss will, 
when seen in the proper perspective, be one of the bright chap- 
ters in the history of Education in the United States. Slowly, 
gropingly, patiently, persistently, untiringly, men worked their 
way through the outer darkness into the light of a new day. 
The advanced stage of the pedagogy of one of the grand 
divisions of the new system was of untold value in developing 
the other grand division. That is to say, the state of the Mathe- 
matics, Physics, and Mechanics, fundamental to a broad de- 
velopment of the Mechanic Arts, was such as to afford a good 
foundation. They were exact and exacting in their require- 
ments, and automatically excluded weaklings and the imma- 
ture and unprepared and set the mark for a proper collegiate 
training to those who should find their proper work in the other 
great field of production — that of Agriculture. The enormous 
modification necessary to be made in the primary sciences 
which are fundamental to Agricultural Science, such as Chem- 



istry and Biology, delayed the day of a similar pedagogical de- 
yelopment in the second grand division. 

It was a long, long way to even a fairly successful use of 
Agriculture as a means of education. 

It still remained for the law to specifically set forth, in a for- 
mal way, what by implication was in the original act, namely, 
the essential ministry of the natural and physical sciences, and 
that great correlating science, indispensible to all industrial 
education, Economic Science. Indeed, Political Economy was 
in 1862 and long after, an inductive science scarcely capable 
of rendering the essential service to industrial education. This 
apparent, but not real omission from the organic act was spe- 
cifically set forth in the Second Morrill Act in 1890, and the 
sphere of industrial life was rounded out by the addition of 
Domestic Economy. 

Permit an aside here, to deprecate the lack of a proper use 
of that great and inclusive phrase, "the mechanic arts," and 
the substitution therefor, in common parlance and college cur- 
riculums, of the subordinate term, "Engineering." The term 
"Engineering" by no means fills the concept of the "Mechanic 
Arts," and a broad field of future college development in this 
direction lies even yet unexplored. There are the Fine Arts 
and the Liberal Arts. There are also Agricultural Arts and 
Household Arts ; and there are the Mechanic Arts, which relate 
to the manipulation of all constructional work of whatever kind, 
and the manipulation of all materials, whether of clay, or wood, 
or metal, or what not. Most of us have judged all too narrowly 
in the use which we have made of the fundamental laws and 
technique of the mechanic arts as they lend themselves to an 
educational program. 

The practical outcome of the establishment of this system 
which we imperfectly describe as the system of "Land Grant 
Colleges and Universities," is historically interesting. We have 
stumbled forward with a narrowness and selfishness that seems 
natural to school men. The most astonishing fact is that we 
have failed to comprehend that we had established a system 
of National Education — national in its legislative origin, and 
truly national and original in its conception, both of ends and 
means. A half century later we are aware that the doctrine has 
engulfed the secondary and elementary schools and has pro- 
foundly affected the strongholds of the older system. There 
are those, even, who would deny that the land grant colleges 
are the true exponent of the great forward sweep of modern 
education. 

There are those who do not comprehend the ministry of the 
college in the education of the industrial classes, and who do 
not differentiate this ministry from that of the secondary or 



the elementary school, and who would make of the college, a 
school of arts and handicrafts. The persons who so interpret 
usually have a low conception of the word ' ' industrial, ' ' as 
though it related to something servile, as though it were appli- 
cable exclusively to the wage earning class, as though it were 
linked merely with manual dexterity and a low degree of 
knowledge. They fail to understand that there is no material 
or force in nature, there is no field of human production, there 
is no branch of constructive work, there is no field of com- 
merce, even, which does not rest upon fundamental laws; that 
these laws may be known and understood and used ; and that 
the reaction of these studies and this training upon the mind of 
man is as important as the means of education as it is in effect- 
ing human welfare. 

There are those again who persist in their failure to compre- 
hend the breadth of the movement, who assume that the 
National system relates to Agriculture alone (and that in its 
narrowest sense), or, Agriculture — plus Domestic Economy, or 
these plus Engineering, and who do not see that the new system 
involved an entire change in front, a revolution in means and 
methods and ends, the opening up of education to the great 
majority and a new conception of the relation of higher educa- 
tion to the state. On the side of Agricultural education alone, 
it involved the development of the substance as well as the 
method of a new curriculum. The reason why Agricultural 
education was rejected for a third of a century was because 
it lacked substance — anything worth considering. The rise of 
agricultural research and the extension of agricultural knowl- 
edge beyond the college to the people was but the rational and 
necessary sequence of the new national system. The patient 
development of curricula, methods and facilities and the con- 
version of abstract sciences pursued as ends in themselves, to 
concrete sciences used as instruments to the ultimate ends of 
service to mankind are but chapters in the history of this great 
educational movement. 

Since the movement was truly national in legislative origin, 
in economic basis, and in educational ideals, there should have 
been and there ought to be at this late hour, a national Depart- 
ment of Education presided over by a Secretary of Education, 
who should contribute to the unification and efficiency of the 
system, and to the development of its ideals for the education 
of an industrial democracy. There have been official attempts 
to measure the institutions of the national system by the stand- 
ards of the traditional college of the literary system and to 
discredit those that departed from the old regime. There have 
been other attempts to reduce them from the position of col- 
leges to that of trade and occupational schools. There have 



been still other attempts to narrow their sphere to the service 
of a single industry. 

As a defense against misconception, attack and injury, a 
Department of Education would have been of the highest im- 
portance. 

There would have been such a Department and such a Sec- 
retary had there not been within the Department of the In- 
terior, for half a century, a rare lack of perception of our 
national aspiration in education, a rare lack of an understand- 
ing of the relation of Education to the Industrial Development 
of a nation, and a rare appreciation of the paramount import- 
ance of other things. 

How startling that there should have existed, for half a cen- 
tury, a national system of Education, so distinctive in its char- 
acteristics, so closety related to the national development, for 
which this department was responsible, and that it should not 
have known it. The system was ready made to hand. It was 
the system of the "land grant" colleges and universities. 
There was at least one institution of the type in each and 
every state. There was a distinctive ideal to be developed. The 
"leading object" (to use the words of the Morrill Act) in each 
was the same. There was work of national significance to do. 
New methods were to be discovered; new instruments to be 
invented ; and a unity in the movement was to be devised. Each 
institution was to be accounted for in the national budget. 
How rarely strange that for more than half a century the sole 
function assumed by the responsible governmental department 
should have been left to clerks and underlings whose sole task 
was the checking up of accounts of the several states in the 
matter of Addition — but not always in Subtraction and 
Division. 

It is almost equally amazing that out of the same Depart- 
ment of the Interior there should have emerged, under almost 
accidental circumstances, a new Department — that of Agricul- 
ture — destined to develop with amazing rapidity, assuming not 
only the legitimate functions of such a national department, 
but likewise absorbing the purely educational and pedagogical 
functions of the new educational system. This Department 
has stood sponsor, not merely for the agricultural side of the 
system, but likewise, in a measure, for all its other industrial 
phases, particularly that of Home Economies. This vigorous 
young giant, the Department of Agriculture, brought to life by 
reason of the Agricultural College, has easily elbowed out of 
the way whatever feeble attempts at self assertion may have 
been made by the departments charged with the educational 
function of our national government. From time to time, feel- 
ing the throb of the great national movement toward a rational 

10 



system of education adapted to an industrial commonwealth, 
the Bureau of Education has made attempts to break into our 
local systems of secondary and elementary schools — at least, 
with sound advice. Baffled at every turn because it is an out- 
sider to our purely local agencies, the Department seems to 
be wholly ignorant of the dictum that educational movements 
are from above downward, and to be wholly unconscious of the 
fact that it has ready made to hand, and has had for half a 
century, a system for which it is responsible, a system through 
which the end in view could be accomplished, and yet which it 
has practically neglected. It is a system found in every state, 
fed from the national treasury ; it is a system as broad and far 
reaching as human industry; it is in need of unification, in 
need of pedagogical guidance ; and yet at times wholly neglect- 
ed and lacking the sympathy in its aims and methods, of the 
governmental department, charged with the duty of 
representing the nation's interest in education. 

The purely educational problems of the national system are 
many and important. The first step should be the establish- 
ment of a solidarity of interest between the land grant colleges 
and universities in the several states and sympathetic relations 
with the responsible educational department of the govern- 
ment. The institutions should be led to a common understand- 
ing of the ministry of the college and university on the one 
hand as contrasted with that of the elementary and secondary 
schools on the other. The institutions in the several states 
should begin and end their undertakings at the same academic 
stage. They should promote a just balance in the educational 
development of the several divisions of the industrial classes so 
that the one should not outrun the other. Agriculture, 
Mechanic, Commercial, Economic and Household Arts and Sci- 
ences should progress with equal pace. This is the theory 
which has dominated our politico-economic development for a 
century past. This is the meaning: of our protective tariff 
theory to which we as a nation have been devoted. Through 
this balance of the industries has come national power and 
prosperity. Our national educational system should be and is 
the counterpart in theory of the development and balance of 
the several industrial pursuits of our people. AVe need the 
strength and dignity and sympathetic guidance of a National 
Department of Education to accomplish these ends. Its pri- 
mary function might well be the co-ordination of the existing 
national system of land grant colleges and universities, the sta- 
tistical and informational function of the Bureau readily sink- 
ing into a secondary position in the Department. The Depart- 
ment of Agriculture should then divest itself of its growing 
pedagogieal responsibilities and undertakings which already 



hamper its legitimate development in a degree, and which do 
not properly belong to it. Great as its service has been, the 
original collegiate functions of the system already feel in the 
pressure of such a highly specialized department the unbalance, 
which a strictly educational department would restore. 

If presently, such legislation as that proposed by the Page 
Bill, or the Hughes Bill, be enacted into law, covering a field 
of education affecting all the people and for which, under no 
pretense, could the department of agriculture be held re- 
sponsible, the administration of the law would fall naturally 
and easily into a Department of Education. 

There is no necessary reason why such expansion of the na- 
tional industrial ideal in education should overthrow or even 
seriously disturb our state and local system. Yet it would 
surely and rapidly carry downward into the lower schools, the 
ideals and methods and the substance which the land grant col- 
leges and universities have so patiently and so successfully de- 
veloped. 

It would be absurd to establish a vast and far-reaching sys- 
tem of education, no matter if it be called vocational, and en- 
trust its development to the combined tender mercies of a De- 
partment of Agriculture, a Department of Commerce, a De- 
partment of Labor, etc., merely because the said departments 
touch upon their respective interests in the industrial classes ; 
and the addition of the Postoffice Department to this hydra- 
headed federal vocational board promises little that is remedial 
in such a system. 

Nor are we looking for a duplicate system of education. We 
are looking for the rationalizing of the existing system which 
shall adapt it to the needs of an industrial commonwealth. All 
that the idea of these vocational proposals involve, we now 
have in the basic national system of higher education, which, if 
extended, under a wise Department of Education, to the aid of 
secondary education and not distorted by the over stimulus of 
a single industry, will modify our existing school system to 
meet the new and growing demands. 

I have not a word to say, in this connection, concerning 
Washington's dream of a national university, nor of the modern 
amendments to his conception, except this, that should it de- 
velop out of the system for which the great departments of 
Agriculture and Education are sponsors, it would add one more 
means of moulding our hybrid people into a homeogenous 
nation. 

Under recent developments we are liable to forget that the 
center and soul of this great epoch-making movement is after 
all a "college"; that it is primarily an EDUCATIONAL move- 
ment, and that the trunk out of which such vigorous branches 

12 



as Agricultural Experimentation and Extension grew must be 
maintained in its proper strength and development as the true 
source of life. The college may well say "I am the vine, ye 
are the branches. ' ' 

I am fully conscious of the danger of disturbing the delicate 
balance of local and state education, and of the preciousness of 
the individuality of each institution. Your alma mater is your 
own dear mother whose life and personality is precious in your 
sight. There must therefore be the greatest care and breadth 
of view on the part of the national government in the extension 
of the new system of national education. But is not the same 
care essential in our finance, our commerce, and in every other 
phase in which the national government touches our national 
life? Dominated by a broad and liberal policy, we may well 
entrust governmental function in Finance to a Department of 
Finance, Commerce to Commerce, Labor to Labor, Agriculture 
to Agriculture, and Education to Education. But we can not 
wisely entrust an educational movement which involves prac- 
tically all classes of society and every type of industry to a de- 
partment, charged with other and serious duties. We should 
entrust it to a Department of Education. We need such a de- 
partment and we need it now. 

The development and unity of our national ideal in our sys- 
tem of land grant colleges and universities have suffered some- 
what from a seemingly wise provision of the original organic 
act. It seemed wise to permit existing institutions to modify 
their aims so as to make the "leading object" of the institu- 
tion conform to the new ideal and thus become the land grant 
colleges of the state, and the beneficiaries of the national legis- 
lation. The grant might be made to colleges and universities 
whose "leading object" was instruction in Agriculture and 
the Mechanic Arts. The ultimate effect has been the establish- 
ment of two types of institutions, with the use of two words, 
"college" and "university," neither of which is well defined 
in American usage. Confusion and difficulty and a certain 
lack of a solidarity much to be desired has been the result of 
this provision. Both institutions may begin at the same point, 
employ the same facilities, use the same technique, rely on the 
same fundamental laws, proceed by the same methods to the 
same distance and with the same efficiency, and yet the pride 
of name may enter as a disturbing element in a uniform 
national system of education. The public, as well as the student 
and the faculties, is disturbed in mind. The popular imagina- 
tion attaches to a university a curriculum as wide as the uni- 
verse, though as a matter of fact, a genuine University might 
have a very narrow curriculum, and there might exist a very 
broad curriculum with a slight resemblance to a real university. 

13 



The popular notion again is that a limited program of studies 
of a purely technical character, relating solely and narrowly to 
Agriculture measures the length and breadth of the Agricul- 
tural College system. Such a college, according to the popular 
notion, is comparable in all respects and parallel to the single 
department of agriculture in an institution called a university. 
Thus, not only is the equally broad conception of the Mechanic 
Arts overlooked, and the broader conception of the education 
of the industrial classes, but more important still, the basic ne- 
cessity of the primary sciences, which every technical division 
feeds upon as the very bread of life, is wholly ignored, and the 
eyes are shut to the vital fact that the educated man, whatever 
may be his field of activity in life, must feed also upon corre- 
lated subjects of higher education. A division of Agriculture 
in any college or University would, above all others, if separat- 
ed and isolated from the institution, die. 

It is interesting to note that in the twenty of our state uni- 
versities, which are the land grant institutions of their respect- 
ive states, the ideal of our national system has become the domi- 
nating ideal of the institution, and the objects of the national 
system are, as a matter of fact as well as of law, the " leading 
objects" of these institutions, whether the institution is con- 
scious of it or not. The old ideals, ends and means of college 
and university life have, in these cases, given way to the new, 
largely; the old "learned professions" have yielded, in the 
eyes of the, youth of the land, to the new professions and voca- 
tions. The new National ideal and system occupies an undis- 
puted pre-eminence in the minds of the people. Fortunately or 
unfortunately, we have the land grant state college and the 
land grant state university. Each has exercised a great influ- 
ence over the other. The state college has again and again re- 
called the university to its original task of service to the in- 
dustrial classes; the university, on the other hand, has again 
and again, lifted the state college out of the slough of low 
scholarship and inspired it with higher ideals of the real min- 
istry of higher education. The interchange of teachers and 
curricula has been of the utmost importance to both. From 
both alike, the great and beneficent Department of Agriculture 
has drawn its recruits. From 1887 until after 1900, this one 
association united both the separate and combined institutions 
in and undisturbed development of the new ideal. The soli- 
darity of interest has too often been confined to a single de- 
partment — that of Agriculture, but it should be extended 
through the entire realm of education insofar, at least, as it 
affects human industry. A danger lies within the universities 
themselves, of a lack of a true perception of the length and 
breadth of the national ideal. 



A fuller recognition of the entire national movement would 
lead us to the establishment of experiment stations in the realm 
of the Mechanic Arts, as we did long ago in Agriculture. In 
that period the backward stage of Agricultural Science made 
such a step imperative. Today America is on the verge of its 
life as an Agricultural people and in the beginning of the stage 
of manufacture for a world market. In fifty. years we will be 
in the industrial stage in which Germany is now — or was a 
little while ago. Our future is linked with our progress in the 
fundamentals of the Mechanic Arts. 

We are already conscious of the fact that our progress in 
agricultural production has outrun our understanding of and 
control of Economic Law, and we are even now laying the 
foundation in the Economic investigations and teachings of the 
college and the Department of Agriculture for the proper de- 
velopment of this phase of the work. 

If we comprehend in a measure, the length and breadth of 
the new national system for which we stand sponsors, if we 
properly co-ordinate and balance the several agencies at our 
disposal and if, with unity of purpose, we are able to realize, 
in national organization, the possibilities of the system, we may 
be able to give an account of our stewardship of which we need 
not be ashamed. 



15 



PC 



17. 



